


insurrection song

by tigrrmilk



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Gen, humans are the absolute worst, no war but class war, space sex parties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 11:23:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4135596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She smiles, and says, “it’s best to take precautions, Titus.”</p><p>“Yes,” he says. “As ever, you are quite right.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	insurrection song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fenellaevangela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenellaevangela/gifts).



> i thought: what would a deer splice be doing, working as a fixer?
> 
> and this is what came to me. i hope you enjoy it.

 

 

Could I wish humanity different?  
Could I wish the people made of wood and stone?  
Or that there be no justice in destiny or time? 

**TO A FOIL'D EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONAIRE, walt whitman**

 

 

 

 

 

“I thought that deer were supposed to be skittish,” Titus says. He runs a finger along his lower lip, and smiles the kind of smile that Famulus knows well. It’s the kind of smile that says: we are both going to pretend that my breeding means that my teeth aren’t much sharper than yours.

Famulus smiles back at him, her eyes slightly wide. “Oh,” she says. “At first, we are. It’s such a big, bright galaxy. _So much_ to take in.”

“At first?” Titus says. Now he runs his finger over the rim of his glass, and it rings, slightly. His finger is still wet from his lip.

Famulus blinks, twice. “Well,” she says. She touches her head, once, very slightly. “We grow up,” she says. “We fight --”

“Do you rut?” Titus asks, with that smile again. Famulus pauses, and then continues.

“And we learn -- well. If we let ourselves be shocked that easily, we’ll be run down.”

 

***

 

Famulus is good at making friends. She’s always been good at making friends. There are so many _good reasons_ for making friends.

She’s been working for Titus for little over a month when she works out where her best alliances will be formed. She had tried talking to his personal tailor -- boring, and snobbish about splices -- his kitchen staff -- too busy to talk, and they act like she isn’t -- and even the woman he employs as a scribe -- _too_ friendly, yet apparently he writes nothing of value in his letters -- with little success. Oh, she has plenty of people to eat dinner with, and she understands better how his estate works, how it really works, the _bones_ of it, which is always good to know -- but. She needs to find someone who can tell her the rest of it. It’s a big, big galaxy, and this isn’t the job the academy thought it was preparing her for.

She needs to know where the faults lie.

They had still managed to prepare her for it _quite_ well, of course. But they thought they were sending her into diplomacy, or a minor bureaucratic office. They had not explained these private estates -- how they come to be and grow over thousands of years.

It was during the first of his parties that she comes to understand.

She had expected Titus’s parties to be full of people -- like Titus. Boring, and decorous, and full of lascivious glances. But maybe she was thinking too much about _class_ and not enough about _Titus_. The party is -- not really a party at all.

Well, a party of a _sort_ , but it seems like such a tame word. Still, she was right, right from the start, the first time they spoke: don’t let yourself seem shocked, even if you are. It’s not so much the form of the party that she’s shocked by -- she’s seen people fucking before, and she knows people fuck in all sorts of ways that they probably think are very imaginative -- but that Titus seeks out the company of -- well. People like her.

Splices. Not that she much likes the word.

“I suppose you wouldn’t care to join?” Titus asks, taking a breather at the bar, where Famulus has been... observing. He rolls his shoulders and looks over at his empire of willing fucks, space dark as death behind them.

“Didn’t anyone tell you not to mix work and pleasure?” Famulus asks.

“What’s work?” he asks, and then gets back to it.

She looks at him, and the people he’s with, and thinks: them. They will know, if anyone will.

 

***

 

“His sister loves growing old,” the girl with cat-eyes, and grey-blue hair says. They are eating breakfast in a banquet hall.

The party lasted for three weeks.

“I’ve heard she _likes_ the way her body changes,” one of the others says, and they laugh dirtily.

The kitchen staff have presented them all with so many pancakes that they will never eat them all. Famulus holds a fork in one hand and slowly eats her way through a fruit salad, green berries and red leaves crisp and cold on her tongue, between her teeth.

“Has Titus ever -- aged noticeably?” she asks. The cat-eyed girl shifts in her seat.

“Well,” she said. “We’re all so young. And look at him now!”

“No,” one of the others cuts in. Her hair is sleek and long and dark, except for a white stripe just to the right of her parting. “He hasn’t. I think he bathes in it every five years.” She looks around, and smirks. “I haven’t always partied,” she says, nudging the boy next to her. She looks at Famulus, and says, slightly wistfully, “I used to bathe in it, too. I paid for it twice, stole a third...”

She doesn’t look so young, now. “How can he afford it so often?” she says.

“ _Nobody_ can afford it that often,” the woman says. She shrugs. “Maybe he doesn’t mind dying, if it means he only has to grow old once.”

“Imagine wanting to party forever,” the cat-eyed girl says, slicing into a pancake with the side of her fork, and yawning into her hand. “I think that was enough for me, thanks.”

“What are you going to do now?” Famulus asks.

“Oh, you know,” she says. “Life, probably.” She looks at her, wistfully, and asks, “don’t you get sick of it?”  
  
“Of what?” Famulus asks.

“Being around them,” she says. “They think they’re so -- pure, and that we’re just -- tricks.”

“Well,” Famulus says. “I’ve always intended on being the _best_ trick in the box.”

 

***

 

Of course, they do not _stay_ friends. Famulus has no need of long-term friends, of people to write letters to. Famulus knows, now: the people you should ask for insight are the partygoers. Not the humans Titus employs; not his less-good mercenaries, who know nothing about him except what he wants to kill and hurt, because she knows that already. Even the other splices in his employ are no good to her; they never see him. _She_ is the one they come to. So the people she should talk to are: those who are most like her. Those who are beneath his notice, except for when they’re _not_. The willing fucks.

It’s not the nicest term, but it’s the one that’s stuck in her head. _Splices_ sounds so euphemistic. And besides, they are of two classes: those who are half-human, and those who are brazen and open, and might as well have fun while they can.

She is of one, and not of the other.

“It all sounds like a lot of hard-work,” a young man with scales says to her, once, wrapped in a blanket and holding a mug of sparkling broth between his hands. “Don’t you ever want to just -- take some time off? Do something fun?”

She smiles at him. “No,” she says, truthfully. “I find my work is reward enough.”

She dreams of the future, the maw of space her screen to project onto.

 

***

 

She doesn’t like Titus, but that doesn’t matter. If he thinks of her as a trick, she thinks of him as many things: an obstacle, a fool, a screen between her and the world, even though she is out there, getting her hands dirty.

Because the thing is: everyone assumes that she’s serving him; that _everything_ she does is for him. Maybe the only people who don’t assume that are -- those she breakfasts with, on those long, warm days, in the banqueting hall, when she promises Titus she’s procuring signatures for non-disclosure agreements. Those who can see where the faults lay.

“Yes, yes,” he says, although he adds, in a private voice, “who in the galaxies would listen to them, anyway?”

She smiles, and says, “it’s best to take precautions, Titus.”

“Yes,” he says. “As ever, you are quite right.”

She remembers her bed in the Academy. She remembers learning to write, and how it had felt at first that her body was not made for it. She remembers the tall windows, and the textbooks with drawings of anatomy, and animals, and deer.

“But why did they make us?” she had asked, when she was fourteen, and sick of it. “If they didn’t want us to behave like we _want_ to?”

She meant; if they didn’t want us to be as free to do what we wish as they are.

The man had tapped his mouth with his fingers, and he spoke truthfully, because he was old, and had spent his life in service to this academy and the children they made.

“They do not make you because they wish for you to be animals,” he said. “They make you because they wish for you not to be human.”

 

***

 

And so, it is easy. It is easy to plot with Titus about how best to beat the recurrence of his dear, dead mother -- about how best to take possession of Earth. Better Titus than his clever sister or his miser brother -- Titus, who will squander what he has, and who will provoke a war in doing it.

She looks at the recurrence’s faithful servant, the wolf-boy, trapped in a cage, and she smiles. One day, they and theirs will inherit all of this; but for now, she has no time for class traitors, for those who genuflect and who have lost sight of themselves, of their own best interests.

Famulus knows why she was made; and one day, under either this or another sickly sun: she knows what she will do with what they gave her.

 

 


End file.
